In recent years, with the development of the national economy, inflammable and explosive liquids/gases, such as gasoline, liquefied petroleum gas, propane, and so on, are more and more widely used in daily production and life. Typically, the inflammable and explosive liquids/gases are stored in fuel tanks.
A fuel tank, which is a container for receiving oil, refers in particular to a device for the storage of fuel oil on a machine driven by a diesel engine or a gasoline engine.
Generally, space above a liquid level in a fuel tank is filled with mixed combustible gases. When there is an ignition source, the ignition source will ignite adjacent mixed gases. The combustion of the mixed gases will spread rapidly if not restricted. Because of the ignition and flame propagation, an increasing pressure wave will be generated in front of the flame front, the pressure wave will strongly compress unburned mixed gases and lead to an explosion of the tank, the whole process may happen in only a few milliseconds.
Therefore, in production, transportation, storage and use processes, burning and explosion accidents often happen due to improper security measures or accidents, and significant property damages and casualties are often caused. Therefore, the suppression of fires and explosions of hazardous chemicals is attracting more and more attention.
In recent years, the emergence of various anti-explosion materials effectively solves the security issues of flammable and explosive liquids/gases in production and storage processes, wherein alloy mesh anti-explosion material is particularly widely used.
The alloy mesh anti-explosion material has the characteristics of good thermal conductivity, strong electrical conductivity, large specific surface area, and so on. After being fully distributed in the fuel tank, it can effectively curb the propagation of the flame and attenuate the explosive pressure wave rapidly. Meanwhile, this kind of alloy mesh anti-explosion material has high surface efficiency in unit volume, so that it has good heat absorption; it can absorb the heat released from combustion rapidly, reduce the temperature after combustion reaction, and decrease the expansive degree of the reaction gases. The increase of pressure within the container is limited and the burning rate cannot reach the speed limit of explosion, so that the purpose of explosion proof is achieved.
However, the main component of the alloy mesh anti-explosion material is metals such as aluminum and magnesium, although they have a certain degree of corrosion resistance, there exists the problems of oxidation and aging. Once aged, the material will become brittle and form debris, the debris will fall when being subjected to vibrations and then cause oil pollution or blockage of an oil pipeline. Therefore, the alloy mesh anti-explosion materials need to be replaced regularly, which increases the cost and labor.
In order to overcome the above-mentioned problems, non-metallic balls are used as anti-explosion materials in the prior art. However, various non-metallic anti-explosion balls in the prior art usually have complicated manufacturing processes and low efficiencies.